The Prince and the Processor
by Persephone Kore
Summary: Complete. Cowritten with Alan Sauer. Just a bit of speculative fiction based on the Wizard's Holiday preview excerpts and the many questions as to just what was going on with Roshaun....


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Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction based on the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane. No undue claim nor material profit is intended or expected. Authors' note: This was written speculatively based on the excerpts posted to the official Young Wizards website before publication of Wizard's Holiday, and we knew it was pretty improbable when we did it. The concept is partly the result of PK briefly thinking "reddish gold" referred to hair instead of metal and making strange associations, as well as the excerpts' having left a little room for speculation that Roshaun might not exactly be a wizard at all....

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The Prince and the Processor  
by Alan Sauer and Persephone

Dairine had, three minutes ago, asked Spot to bring up an index of all the social information and recent history available on the planet Alaalu and its solar system in hopes of finding something that would shed light on what Nita and Kit were facing. 

Thirty seconds ago, she had just been thinking that either Alaalu had an unusually large body of references or Spot was being unusually slow when a polite chirp had prompted her to turn and look at a screen filling gradually with gibberish. 

Something had, very distinctly, sniggered. Dairine had gulped. 

She still felt as if she'd swallowed a large and very jagged chunk of ice and didn't seem to be able to take her eyes off the monitor. 

Dairine could still remember very clearly when Spot had first started talking to the motherboard and lapsed entirely into binary. At the time she'd half expected to die in the next few minutes if her only way to do wizardry quit functioning -- but somehow, just at the moment, she thought she actually felt _worse_. She knew that laugh.

Without much hope, she hit a key to see if that worked again. 

...And it did. Sort of. A very mangled prompt appeared; Dairine frowned at it. "What?"

Spot's reply was equally garbled; the only word Dairine could identify was "virus." 

Spot didn't _get_ viruses! 

But when he did he evidently got very persistent ones. Dairine buckled down to work and, after half an hour, had gotten nowhere except to the absurd conclusion that the Lone Power was interfering directly and in person with her manual, her _partner_ as far as she was concerned, in the form of a computer virus. Only... that laugh. Maybe it wasn't absurd.... 

All the diagnostics pointed that way. 

She sat back and stared at Spot warily. She ought to be able to fix this. There were ways to fix this with a spell, and the same rule about wearing a body that could be acted on within a universe ought to apply at some level to manifesting as a computer virus. She ought to be able to delete the Lone Power's files forcibly. 

Unfortunately, her manual was out of commission. 

Well, she still ought to be able to do it. Dairine sat up and scowled. She'd had the manual dumped into her mind; she knew the Speech well enough -- just because she wasn't used to planning any spells without Spot didn't mean she _couldn't_.... 

She plotted the spell structure on notebook paper with a pencil sharp enough she scratched a tear right through and snapped off the point. Spot -- no, _not_ Spot, either -- sniggered again. 

It should have been right. The structure looked right. But the silence sang wrong as she Spoke the words, and when she got to the Lone Power's name (which was rarely used in spells for a very good reason) the menace was alarmingly lacking. What had she done? What was _It_ doing? 

The spell had gathered too much momentum to stop, especially once she'd begun the name; when she finally said the wizard's knot with sweat starting to run into her eyes, something _twanged_ downstairs and set her teeth on edge. 

"Ouch!" Roshaun's voice carried the way one might expect for someone with oratorical training since he could string two words together; his footsteps up the stairs sounded decidedly annoyed, as might be expected from someone who was Roshaun. "What in the name of all lesser and greater stars are you _doing,_ girl?"

Dairine stared a bit wildly at Spot, who was unaffected, and tried to get up before Roshaun reached her room. This didn't work: the spell might have completely failed in its intent, but it had done more than enough to drain her. Which was not good. Especially if she had done it to Roshaun -- she was still trying to be good and not throttle him. "That's a good question," she croaked, then cleared her throat and managed to turn around ungracefully in her chair to find an incredulous (and annoyed) prince in her doorway. 

"Of course it is." Roshaun arched an elegant eyebrow. "Well?"

She didn't seem to have hurt him too badly, anyway. Dairine gritted her teeth. _Too bad. No, I don't mean that. Much._ But why would that spell have done anything to him at all? "I was trying to get a virus off Spot."

"Very carelessly."

"I was not being careless!"

The other eyebrow went up, just as elegantly. "Your device," he drawled, pointing at Spot, "is _here._ _I_ was downstairs, and I should hope I bear little resemblance to either it or its affliction. And yet you managed to hit me instead of it. Would you prefer I used the word 'negligent?' 'Ignorant?' Words are a wizard's business, or so I'm told, so I'm sure you can think of the proper term."

Dairine felt her temper fraying, possibly on his eyebrows. "All right. I got the spell wrong. It doesn't seem to have injured you, so why don't you go away while I try to figure out what I did?" She probably shouldn't tell him he did remind her of a computer virus. Really. 

"I think not. If you should repeat the error with something more potent, I would rather you be on hand to reverse your botch swiftly. And I do not care to climb these stairs again."

"Let me guess, you don't have to bother with stairs on your world either." She glanced worriedly at Spot. The screen flickered, and she heard a splurting noise like an abortive raspberry.

"Hardly." Roshaun waved a languid hand toward the misbehaving computer. "You have my leave to proceed."

"Thank you so much." Dairine glared at her paper and tried to concentrate. Her handwritten rendition of the Speech was, unfortunately, not helping. The overly perfect-looking infuriating _boy_ who was somehow managing to lounge with perfect posture in her doorway wasn't either. "And you definitely don't resemble Spot, but you're not quite bad enough to compare to the Lone Power masquerading as a virus, either." 

A perfectly amused smile. "I should certainly think not, no."

Of course he wouldn't. Dairine closed her eyes for a moment. What had she said, and what had gone wrong? And what was there in the spell that could possibly have _touched_ him, because little as she liked it he had a point. He really didn't resemble anything she thought she'd said. "There really isn't anything..." she said, half to herself.

"Oh, come now," Roshaun snapped, an odd whisper of resonance peeking out from behind his polished tone. "I know enough of wizardry to know that there is _always_ something. Are you utterly helpless without your crutch?"

"I wasn't talking to you!" 

"I'm the only other one here."

"I wasn't... talking... to you," she grated. "There isn't anything in the spell that should be affecting _you_ even if I did get it wrong!"

"A spell always works, I'm told." The resonance was back, slightly stronger; Spot's screen shimmered almost too quickly to catch. "Since it _did_ affect me, you're obviously not looking hard enough."

"Yes. I've noticed. Either that or you _do_ resemble either Spot or the virus. And what are _you_ doing?" She turned to glower at him instead and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment; her vision had done something very odd....

"At the moment? Standing here waiting for you to do something productive. Or at least mildly diverting, as that seems to be all you can manage."

"You sounded funny." She peered at him cautiously again and looked over the spell. It certainly shouldn't have affected the air, and there was nothing that even resembled the words for vision or eyes.... 

"I was trained in diction by no less than a dozen masters of the art of rhetoric," Roshaun snapped, and Spot's screen blinked. "If I sound 'funny,' then perhaps you should get your hearing checked."

"You know, maybe I should let you do this; you're having more of an effect on Spot than I am." Dairine felt marginally cheered by the exasperation in Roshaun's tone. 

"I'm not a wizard, Dairine," he replied in the syrupy tone of voice she'd hated even when she really _was_ young enough that some adults thought she needed everything explained. "You have to be a wizard to solve a wizardly problem. And in any case I have no idea what you mean."

"Then you weren't watching," she retorted. "Spot's flickering when you talk; it's more than my spell seems to have done to him --" She looked down at the paper again and bit her tongue hard, staring at it. That syllable definitely did not belong in the Lone Power's name. Not any version that was likely to be messing up Spot, anyway.... She groaned under her breath: she'd named the reconfigured version, or at least something closer to that... and she still couldn't seem to think clearly enough to straighten out the muddle.

"Well, it certainly can't be anything I'm doing," Roshaun said, sounding decidedly disconcerted. "I want nothing to do with the thing."

"That's all right, you bug him too." Dairine paused to consider whether Roshaun could be rousing Spot through sheer irritation factor. Probably not. "And just because you aren't a wizard doesn't mean using the Speech won't do _anything_...." 

It usually, however, didn't do quite the _same_ things. And she still needed to get the Lone Power's name right, and she still needed to figure out where Roshaun was getting into her spell. 

Wait. He couldn't -- surely -- right? Dairine tried thinking this in the Speech, as an experiment, and found that she had even more trouble forming the thought coherently. And he _definitely_ wasn't Spot.... nor did he bear much resemblance to a preposition.

She looked up appraisingly at him, trying to see past the looks and personality -- though come to think of it.... "You wouldn't happen to have the Lone Power's proper name memorized, would you?"

"Yes, of course, it was a vocal exercise. When will the sentence 'I am not a wizard' hold any meaning for you?"

"A _vocal exercise_?!" Dairine stared. "You've got to be kidding me."

"Ah! The obvious _is_ within her grasp. I owe myself several rather large land holdings. Very good, dear; next we will work on subtlety."

Dairine sighed. "Do you know it or not? I need it."

Which, she added encouragingly to herself, was also a good reason not to hit him. 

"What could possibly give you the idea that I carry around several thousand specific syllables in the Speech just in case I find myself stranded on a backward planet with a wizard whose only recourse when her prop is disabled is my own self?" But he looked ever-so-slightly panicked around the eyes.

"I could _probably_ get the motherboard's attention if I tried hard enough, but you're here." _And if you dared call the motherboard a backward planet...._ She didn't think that would go over well at all. "For one thing, kidding around in the Speech can get weird. For another, there really isn't anything I can find in my description of Spot that I can imagine mistaking for you, so unless you got snagged by a rogue structural element the name seems to be both problems here."

"Your memory is poorer than I imagined, or your opinion of me lower, if you named me in place of the Lone Power."

"I named the reconfigured version from after my Ordeal instead of describing It as the enemy, is the problem." That Power was supposed to be possible, if not easy, to recognize. But maybe harder once It wasn't set against everything.... Dairine squinted at him again and sighed. This was going to sound very stupid if she was wrong.... "So. Is that you?"

Roshaun opened his mouth, shut it again with an irritated frown . . . and the arrogance drained out of his posture as if someone had pulled out a cork. "Someday I'm going to figure out how to tell a direct lie in the Speech without making a mess, and maybe _then_ I'll be able to stay undercover around you. I _told_ her this wouldn't work."

"Is that really a good idea?" Dairine blurted, then stopped and blinked. "Told who? And what are you _doing_ here? And didn't you already do it when you said you didn't know what I was talking about?" She frowned. "You specified just one, didn't you. I wasn't paying enough attention." 

"No, you weren't, but you're under a lot of stress. And I told my sister, when she suggested I take this holiday."

"But --" Dairine shut her eyes. "Never mind for a minute. Spot."

"Well, you really did mangle my name pretty badly. You were lucky to catch _me,_ much less what's in Spot. Too fond of our automatic subroutines, are we?"

She flushed hot. "If I agree to that, will you help?" she shot back.

"You recognized me, and now you've _asked_ for help, so yes, I do rather have to. Write this down." Roshaun rattled a long series of characters in the Speech; Spot's screen flickered balefully as he concluded. He grinned at the computer. "Now, now, little cousin, fair is fair and she _did_ ask. Lose gracefully and go put a few more security holes in the new version of Windows, that's a good fellow."

"That's an unusual usage," Dairine muttered. She should have been able to remember -- but she _was_ used to Spot, and a human brain literally couldn't hold as much information as hers had been flooded with when she was connected to the motherboard. She was going to have to make sure she learned some key things before anything like this happened again -- which she hoped it didn't. 

The spell behaved this time; even Roshaun tensed as she neared the end, and when she finished, Spot's screen blanked briefly and then came up rather dazedly with a soft hiccup and the unbitten apple logo. Dairine let out a long breath and told Roshaun conversationally, "So you're good now, and you're _still_ a pest."

"Well, ask Rhiow, that's not new."

She had the feeling she should apologize, considering that "mangling" someone's name -- especially in a spell -- tended to have very unpleasant results, but the Lone Power was probably relatively resilient to that. Except under special circumstances. And she really didn't want to apologize, considering this meant he _had_ been doing everything on purpose! "...It's not fair being a _hot_ pest, either." 

"_That_ goes all the way back to the beginning of things. It's practically my entire oeuvre. I'm just dead sexy, no way around that."

Dairine folded her arms and looked peeved at him some more. "I think I'm going to be disturbed if you say you were Aphrodite. Being obnoxious *does* cut down on it a lot though."

"Well, I could have been now that I'm back, I suppose . . . never really occurred to me to find out."

"Balor was an exception, huh."

"Bad form day?"

"Era?"

"Biblical 'day.'"

"Oh, of course." She considered for a moment. "So, were you _trying_ to get me to strangle you when you first arrived, or was all that just natural?"

"It was funny."

He'd certainly seemed to think so, she thought sourly. "Some things obviously haven't changed a bit."

"Well, no." He smirked. "Did you expect them to?"

"The malicious amusement? Maybe."

"It wasn't malicious. Just very, very irritating."

_Would have fired the landscaper._ "Right. Pull the other one."

Roshaun spread his hands. "Okay, you really have to look at maliciousness as a sliding scale."

"Fine, so you've laughed at worse." She bit down firmly on her tongue before it could run away with her and stood up, a little shakily. "...I'm going to go see how Filif's getting along with the rhododendrons."

"Oh, _come_ on, I was laughing at _you,_ not the things I was saying. Watching you not drop-kick me to Siberia."

"Yes, I'm sure it was very funny when I told myself you couldn't possibly know how offensive you were being."

"Oh, come on, like I meant any of it."

"That doesn't help much!"

"Do you really want me to go through the list of horrible things you and your sister say to each other without meaning them?"

"You're not my sister!" She scowled suddenly, and the frustration came spilling out. "And leave her out of this. And for that matter, next time you want to play games you can leave insulting Dad out of it TOO!" Dairine ended on a raw shout and gulped a bit. She'd been trying so hard not to let him get to her... at least not visibly....

Roshaun looked stricken. "Look, I'm--I'm sorry. Really. And I won't even excuse it by saying function follows form and you start acting like a spoiled brat if you wear a spoiled brat's shape, I just . . . I didn' t know it hurt you that much, all right? It was a game of seeing how hard I could push until you lost your temper, only you didn't, and I carried on too long."

"I've lost it now. Happy?" She folded her arms, as close as she was willing to come to hugging herself right now. 

"No."

Dairine glanced at him and had to admit he didn't look it. She went and stared out the window instead until the odd sideways throbbing in her vision and the heat in her chest started to clear. "You're saying you really couldn't tell."

"Um. You know that saying, always the bridesmaid, never the bride? With me . . . a lot of the time it's 'always the wiseass.'"

"I think that was a yes," she muttered. "Good. You weren't supposed to. But after the _rest_ of the revelations I figured you'd been reading my mind, too."

"I'm not even a wizard in this form, remember?"

"That doesn't stop some people."

"Well, it stops me."

"I'm shocked."

"I have to play by the rules of the form I'm in. That's always been true."

Dairine considered leaning her head against the cool glass, then resisted the temptation on the grounds that she would just have to wash it and rubbed one temple instead. "Which I guess raises the question -- what are you _doing_ in it, anyway? Besides the obvious."

"Learning." His lips twisted. "Not very well."

She looked at him sideways. "Okay, I know the program's supposed to be educational, but...."

"You think there's nothing that a Power--that _I_--couldn't learn from a mortal's perspective?"

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath; thought back, not to the landscaping cracks or her mom dying or the laughter in the ray-shot dark between places, but to the bright, sharp moments when she first knew what the motherboard felt, and what the mobiles felt, and then the burning ones when they'd held the Power the mobiles had just rejected. "I guess," Dairine said quietly, "there's always something." Resentment at being played with when he was supposed to be on the right side now gave a halfhearted poke at her emotions again, but remembering when they'd tried to figure out what to _do_ with him there in the light after he'd said he wanted to go back, holding onto it seemed a little pointless.

"She's a little bit more polite about handing out assignments to family, but I've been the occasion of enough wizards' holidays I really should have gotten the joke."

"I'm hearing some pretty weird things from Neets, yeah."

"She got a better nonintervention guarantee than I did--I actually suspect I was meant to be intervened, which is probably why I landed on you. Very subtle, my sister, sometimes."

"And Nita says _I'm_ a pest. I want to know what kind of 'better nonintervention guarantee' ends up in the message Spot popped up with last. Apparently you're there, too."

"Which me?"

"Nita and Kit would really like to know that."

"I wish I could tell them."

"I bet." 

Roshaun eyed her, aggrieved. "Has it ever occurred to you that omnipresence is nearly as confusing to the omnipresent as it is to everyone else?"

"No, it hadn't. Is it?"

"Yes. Remembering who I am in any given point in space at any given moment is a difficult proposition when your set of points and moments are both infinite."

"And if you can learn things, does that mean there are some of them you wouldn't remember *yet*? ...Better off if that's one of them, I guess." She sighed and pushed herself away from the windowsill. "I wasn't being sarcastic, though. And I don't even know if we could get in touch with them right now if you _did_ know." 

"Are they out of ambit for the manual, then?"

"Intermittently. Ponch went too, you know. And they were going down to... look into things. So depending on which of you it is, they might be too busy to check in." She turned and glared out the window again, then rubbed her eyes. "Don't think that's been helping my mood any. Sorry."

"Something else I probably should have guessed."

"I don't know how you would've gotten that one." Dairine was quiet for a moment. "I'm going to go talk to Filif." She looked up at Roshaun again. "...Want to come?"

"And subject myself to insipid meanderings in provincial surrounds?" Roshaun's nose was at a familiar angle, but the twinkle in his eye was unmistakable. "Yes, I believe I do."

*****


End file.
